T w e n t y S i d e d

Aside: at the seven minute mark we all talk over each other at once and nothing makes sense. What happened was that Josh lagged out, and then Vent delivered ten seconds of dialog in a few seconds to get him caught up. Sorry about that. There’s not much that can be done to untangle that when it happens.

And the haters continue to hate. Let the record show that this is Rutskarn’s first F-bomb on Spoiler Warning. Not even Fallout 3 drove him to such mad and desperate measures as using one of the Forbidden Words of Power. Truly these are dangerous times.

Note how the camera cuts away from Ezio to the guys paying off the judges. Does Ezio recall his own life in terms of movie cuts and scenes presented for the benefit of an audience, even things he didn’t personally observe? I wish I remembered life that way. I’d remember every trip to the grocery store in terms of me walking away in slow motion, putting on sunglasses, while the building explodes behind me.

So what is it, Ubisoft? Are we re-living Ezio’s memories or not? Did Ezio really play a round of one-on-one capture the flag where the game was flagrantly stacked against him and the only way to win was to repeatedly fall two stories onto pavement? Historical capture the flag was a children’s game that looked almost nothing like what we see here. In fact, what we see here looks more like modern videogame CTF than anything they might have played in the renaissance. Why did you guys spend so much time meticulously re-creating historical Venice and famous historical figures if you were just going to throw such a hilariously incongruous anachronism into the mix?

How about that plot twist at the end? That thing, that seemed like a stupid waste of time? In the end, it turned out to be… a stupid waste of time! DUN DUN DUN!

As I said, this ended the game for me. I played a few rounds, turned the game off, and never went back. It wasn’t fun. The golden masks made no sense. It made no sense that someone could acquire a golden mask by playing CTF. It made no sense that Ezio would bother to play it. The mechanics of CTF made no sense. The conclusion was both predictable and nonsensical, which is quite an achievement.

And then we get to the party and NOBODY ELSE IS WEARING A GOLDEN MASK, NOT EVEN OUR ALLY WHO IS ALSO AT THE PARTY SOMEHOW. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAarg sdm msdfm, ewj ;jvdsm lk/kfsm lkrwm l3rm io;m f’ l

This is, on balance, dumber than anything in Fallout 3. There. I said it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Has our let’s play of Assassin’s Creed 2 seemed a little boring lately? I know we haven’t had a great deal to say, and our analysis has been spread a little thinner than usual. I’ll admit now that I’ve been holding back a lot of my commentary. For the last couple of months, I’ve been nursing a grudge, nurturing it and growing it until it matured into indignant rage. We’ve finally reached carnival, and the dam has broken. It’s finally time to begin enumerating faults and cataloging the failures.

This isn’t just the point where the game fell apart, this is the point where the series itself ended for me. I realized that the writers had abandoned the direction and tone of the original game. They had set aside the pseudo-historical setting, the philosophical ideas, and the conspiracy thriller, and instead were making a collection of crappy, ill-conceived mini-games. It pissed me off when they used Leonardo Da Vinci as a lever to elevate their risible Mary Sue protagonist. It exasperated me when they watered down the plot with nonsense and filler. But the unpardonable sin was when they took away the fun “parkour and murder” gameplay and replaced it with… whatever this is.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.